Frederic G. Kitton on Marcus Stone and Fred Barnard (1899) — A brief review of the 2004 reprint of Kitton's Dickens and His
Illustrators

Is a critic of Victorian illustration to be credited who
places an accent over the "o" in "Hablot" (i. e., Hablot Knight Browne,
a. k. a. "Phiz")? Despite this solecism, the first critic to make a
methodical study of the work of Dickens's illustrations during his
lifetime and afterwards, including the American illustrators such as Sol
Eytinge and John McLenan then quite unknown in Britain, was Frederic G.
Kitton. In Dickens and His Illustrators
(1899), Kitton comments upon the collaborative work of seventeen British
artists, retailing anecdotes about Dickens, some furnished him by the
artists themselves. Not nearly as thorough as, for example, Michael
Steig in Dickens and Phiz (1978) or Jane R.
Cohen in Charles Dickens and His Original
Illustrators (1980), Kitton often focuses on one particular book
per illustrator, as, for example, Marcus Stone and the plates for the
serial run of Our Mutual Friend (1864-65).

Of
Stone's displacing Phiz as the illustrator for Great
Expectations when it appeared in volume form in the 1862 Library
Edition, Kitton remains silent, reproducing Stone's original sketch for
"Taking Leave of Joe" ("lent by the Artist," facing page 200) with just
the remark "Pip is seen wearing a 'bowler' hat," drawing attention to
the anachronistic aspect of this feature of his attire. The bowler was
introduced in 1850, and would therefore be inappropriate at that point
in the narrative, for Pip, born in 1806 (if we follow the logic of his
just having turned six when he meets the convict in the churchyard on
Christmas Eve, 1812), was about eighteen when he took leave of Biddy and
Joe at the end of the first part of his "Great Expectations" (probably
in 1818). Most authorities (for example, Edgar Rosenberg and Any Sadrin)
give the chronological setting of the action of the novel as being 1812
to 1840. The hat that Pip wears in Stone's sketch has been altered
in the final plate, suggesting that Stone (if we follow Kitton's
contention that
this is indeed a "bowler") became aware of the supposed
anachronism, possibly as a result of showing the sketch to Dickens. The matter
is complicated, however, by the fact that the hat in Stone's sketch
appears to be
a top hat of the early '60s, whereas the hat worn by Pip in
the woodcut appears to be a felt "muffin" hat (see C. Willett and
Phillis Cunnington, 251) of the same period. indeed, the high-crowned hat
(especially if made of silk, as in the 1850s, worn by Pip in the sketch would
seem to be more appropriate for a young gentleman going up to town (i. e.,
London) than the lower-crowned hat of the published illustration.
However, Stone may be making a point about the country haberdasher's
inadequate sense of the fashion of the metropolis, for "A lower-crowned,
broader-brimmed style was worn in the country and unfashionably"
(Buck,194).

Of the less significant illustrators and those who provided visual
accompaniment for Dickens's works for readers after the novelist's
death, Kitton has a little to offer on T. Webster, A. B. Broughton, G.
J. Pinwell, Fred Walker, Charles Green, and a little more on the
prolific F. O. Darley, a New York artist, and Fred Barnard, the principal
illustrator in the British Household Edition of the 1870s. Kitton labels
him "the Charles Dickens among black-and-white artists" (222) for having
illustrated sixteen of Dickens's works with a grand total of 455
drawings. In addition, Barnard got in on the lucrative "characters from
Dickens" market with four series independent of any texts: "Character
Sketches from Dickens" (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1879),
"Character Sketches from Dickens," second series: six photogravures
(same publijshers, 1884), "Character Sketches from Dickens," third
series: six photogravures (same publishers, 1885). Sixteen of the
eighteen plates were made available to the masses through the Christmas
1896 issue of Cassell's Family Magazine. Finally,
for Harry Furniss's short-lived magazine of humour, Lika Joko, Barnard provided studies of characters
from both Shakespeare and Dickens (17 November 1894 to 23 February
1895.

Note

The bowler hat was created in 1850 for an English game warden,
James Coke. It was intended as a riding hat that Mr. Coke could count on
for hard hat protection as he rode his steed through his protectorate
looking out for poachers. It soon became, as Fred Miller Robinson wrote
in The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and
Iconography, " . . . an emblem through the then-incredible
changes that industrialism was engendering-----but as an emblem of many
things, a sign of the times. See
The Hat Blog: Everything Hats, "The Bowler," accessed 22 April 2007:
http://blog.villagehatshop.com/2007/01/the_bowler.html